Fidel Castro 84% Dead

The corpse of Fidel Castro is enjoying a personal renaissance. He’s discovered the haiku form. He admires yogis. He keeps going on about a miracle plant called moringa. He’s ordering helicopter hijackings in California.

All of this activity is very worrying to the White House, according to Riptide’s Deep Throat-style source, who we meet up with in parking lots to mumble through our trench coats (and who is not Todd from the Denny’s on Biscayne Boulevard at 36th Street, so we kindly ask his assistant manager to stop giving him grief for slinking off during work hours).

Riptide is the news leader in figuring out how dead Fidel is. So we mobilized the medical, political, and statistical experts we keep on retainer with our journalism money.

They analyzed Fidel’s recent lively behavior, and this morning they rushed into our office with their lab coats fluttering and documents flying, and after some witty banter and some chitchat about the weather and the MLB home-run derby, breathlessly announced: Fidel is only 84 percent dead, which means, to put it in words you can understand: